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A prepaid plastic recycling envelope in the box, making it easy to recycle your newly obsolete phone. This is a fantastic move on Palm's part, but of course recycling is a last resort if you can't fix it.

A real keyboard! If the touch screen and applications work anywhere near iPhone quality this makes the Pre a very good option for people who actually want to create lots of text content on their mobile device.

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We love the feel of holding the Pre in our hands. In its closed position, it feels much more comfortable to hold than the iPhone.

Notice the extra thickness of the Pre compared to the iPhone (17mm vs 12mm). Not only does this allow the engineers more flexibility in designing the physical layout of components, but it also makes the Pre conform really well to our palm.

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To see your face better while taking photos for MySpace, the Pre includes a mirror on the back.

Unfortunately, the mirror distorts everything in sight-- it conforms to the slight curve of the phone. It also gets easily covered in fingerprints. Your digits will gravitate to this region while holding the phone open.

If the speaker is on the back doesn't that make it more difficult to hear and more likely to be covered by your hand? So in the end does the sound end up being worse in practical usage? The iPhone speaker placement seems to make more sense acoustically.

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"DIV" likely stands for "Diversity", a second antenna for the CDMA receiver that reduces the impact of spatial variations in signal strength and thus increases the average data rate available. Pretty common in CDMA EVDO designs these days.

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The two volume buttons are still connected to the front half of the phone. Completely separating the two halves requires first removing the plastic volume button cover, then peeling up the volume button electronics.

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The hardware keyboard and its associated sliding mechanism weighs 32 grams. That's nearly 25% of the weight of the phone! Even if you're not a fan of a hardware keyboard, there's no denying that packing the keyboard into a device that's not much larger or heavier than the iPhone is a very impressive engineering feat.

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Removing four more small connectors, and the main logic board is finally free.

Like the original iPhone, the Pre has two main boards, the logic board and the communications board.

Unfortunately, everything interesting is carefully hidden beneath metal EMI shields. Not only are the shields soldered to the board, there's epoxy holding them down as well. Palm definitely didn't make it easy to see what makes the Pre tick.

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The camera is one of our biggest complaints with the iPhone. The iPhone suffers from both poor quality photos and a long shutter delay. While the quality is definitely improved on the Pre, it's still pretty slow snapping photos.

You may be able to snip the leads coming out of the camera module, but that would be a pretty permanent solution I imagine.

Man that's too bad. The treo 700p was pretty easy to pull the camera on. Just pull a few screws and the camera just unplugged. I was wondering if that thing it was mounted too was a board or a cable. I guess I'll have to stick with my treo for now and see how the new iPhone looks. I've had a palm in my pocket ever since the 99 when the IIIe came out.

That copper coil on the back panel that comes with the Touchstone charging kit. We talk about it in our touchstone teardown.

Thanks Kyle. when I saw the coil I thought of it but I wasn't sure. I just saw the latest Brink on TV and they mentioned it: the Pre's wireless charging. It's funny that electric toothbrushes got that feature 10 years ago (though a little simpler) and we see it just now appearing in a very obvious application. It looks like that all the engineers who wanted to do this "stuff" (keyboard, wireless charging...) at Apple (and weren't "allowed) went to Palm... It will be interesting to find out what these "big old boys" carriers and other old-style companies (Nokia, Moto....) will come up with when they propose the new "standardized" charging solution for our cells. It should be wireless! Maybe Palm is going to set some standards again (for a while). I hope the Pre will be doing well. We need competition. Otherwise the iPhone will just fade away with its next iteration...nothing much new this year as we found out today.

Does anybody know what the copper coil does that is on the back panel? See photo above (step 23) lower right corner.

It is the inductive charger for the pre called the touchstone charger. The phone is held on to the touchstone by means of the four magnets around the coil. When in place, inductive charging occurs. In other words the phone gets charged without plugging in cables.

Well done for your teardown! Just wanted to point to an erroneous identification of the bluetooth chip. On your pics I can clearly see Marvell's 8686 WLAN chip. However it's not a combo WLAN+Bluetooth chip as there is another chip right next to it that comes from CSR (you can read it on the packaging) and that's CSR's bluetooth SoC. Also the chip underneath the Elpida DRAM die is Texas Instruments's OMAP 3 chip. The other TI chip next to it (TWLXX) is the power management unit that works with it. THx

The TriQuint Cellband PA-Duplexer in the new small 7x4mm package is completely missing in your list and the block diagram! It is TriQuint part number TQM613026A. (You call it a "Duplexer" only, which is wrong.

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Hardware-wise, the Palm Pre is very impressive. Our only hardware complaint was the physical keyboard, although some people may appreciate the hardware keyboard.

The Pre logic board is substantially smaller than the iPhone logic board, which is very impressive considering how renowned Apple's engineers are for shrinking hardware footprints. It's amazing the difference a year can make.

In general, this Palm hardware reminds us a lot more of Apple's engineering style than any of hardware we've taken apart by other manufacturers (like Dell).

For more technical analysis, see the analysis our partners over at PhoneWreck just posted of the Pre.

also if you didnt notice there is no offset from the slide upper to the top of the first row of keys of the QWERTY is pretty much zero. This is a very bad design as it gives no room for your finger to press that row....can get awkward.

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